Interests:Protecting our Ocean, Environmental Education,
Having fun and Living Well

Posted 07 June 2010 - 06:07 PM

Lightroom 3 is now available for purchase! It's hidden behind the Lightroom 2 upgrade, If you click the upgrade button Lightroom 3 shows up. Just in case you cant wait till the Beta expires in June. ;-)

Update- It's official now. Some updates from the beta. The slideshow appears to be improved from the beta, proably some others.

Well, I've got just a couple more days with which to use Adobe educational pricing ($89 for Lightroom). Never really had the need for this before and I just got a MacBook so I've been considering Aperture 3. What is my motivation here? I can browse in Bridge and edit in Photoshop now. Store the decent pictures in folders and publish with JAlbum. Maybe for $89, it's worth it just to play around . . .

Interests:Protecting our Ocean, Environmental Education,
Having fun and Living Well

Posted 08 June 2010 - 11:10 AM

Hi Mike,Here are my top ten reasons to use Lightroom for your consideration. I consider myself still a beginner in the U/W photography world with only 4 or 5 thousand underwater shots under my belt. So take my thoughts with that grain of salt. You will find a similar listing on multiple sites on the net if you Google “Advantages of Lightroom over Photoshop”. I have bastardized and copied profusely from these sites to create this list;

1. Nondestructive editing —nothing is actually changed in an image in Lightroom until the image is exported, no quality is lost as it could be in Photoshop. You can always go back to the original file without saving multiple big files.

2. Much better controls over organizing your photos. Lightroom has Collections and Smart Collections which are very helpful. The photos are not actually moved, the collections are “virtual”, so they don’t take up storage space. It’s a database with all of the advantages that brings.

3. More useful views. Lightroom has compare and survey views of images when you need to compare them for editing them compared to Bridge.

4. Huge advantage in processing multiple images. In Lightroom, you can adjust one photo of a group that you like (say WB for example) then synchronize those adjustments to all the others from the shoot and it’s done. When you find a set of adjustments you make a lot you can set them as a preset and apply them to the next image with one click or even on input to hundreds so common mods are automatic. Think input sharpening for example.

5. Quickly customizable easy to understand interface designed for photographers not graphic artists. All Lightroom controls are available in panels right next to the photos.

6. Nondestructive, easy local adjustments. I did a comparison one time to lighten an area of an image. Keystrokes in PS using layers – 26, keystrokes in LR - 2

7. Nondestructive cloning and healing brush. Photoshop has far more power in its cloning and healing tools than Lightroom, but Lightroom does offer simple cloning and healing that is nondestructive and works very well on a few bits of backscatter.

8. Virtual copies. It’s great to be able to experiment on a photo to get several versions. In Photoshop, you have to actually create separate images to do this, which takes time and storage space. In Lightroom, you simply make a virtual copy of your photo and do whatever you want — little time is taken and essentially no storage space (it is only information).

9. Great printing interface and easy watermarking (LR3)

And the number 10 reason to use Lightroom. It’s just easier and much more intuitive to use. We forget sometimes that the full name of the program is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. It’s designed to work well with PS and there are things you’ll want to do there, but once I understood the capabilities of LR I now rarely need PS.

Let’s take a typical dive day on a boat somewhere. After the dives I typically open up LR, import all the images from the day and back up to a portable harddrive simultaneously. Let’s assume a good day so maybe a few hundred images. I have a preset already setup that defines where I want the images to go, the keywords for the trip, location, etc. defined, the input sharpening I want to use with the body and the lens I used plus a few initial processing things I like to do.

Total mouse clicks to do all that to 500 images - four, five if you count opening the program. The best part is that it frees me up to look at what I can improve and enjoy the time on the boat.

Well, I've got just a couple more days with which to use Adobe educational pricing ($89 for Lightroom). Never really had the need for this before and I just got a MacBook so I've been considering Aperture 3. What is my motivation here? I can browse in Bridge and edit in Photoshop now. Store the decent pictures in folders and publish with JAlbum. Maybe for $89, it's worth it just to play around . . .

Mike I have both LR and Aperture. For some of the things in LR for that price, to me it is worth it just to play with it, if not more so. Steve gave a good list of reasons, and I am going through some photos I shot last night and working them up. Download the free trial and try to put it through its paces a bit and you will see what it can do. There are some things I like in Aperture more than LR and vice versa (and there is alot of things that are similiarish), but I do find myself using LR alot.

As a Mac Fanboy, if I had to make a choice, it would be close and I would almost give the nod to LR - but I have been using LR3 more than Aperture 3 lately and have not really used Aperture 3 enough to say 100%.

Interests:Sunlight reefs, warm seas, fine wine, beautiful women. And Manchester City Football Club

Posted 08 June 2010 - 12:04 PM

Another vote for LR. I've been using it for a little over 2 years in various guises, 1.x, 2.x - and have just got LR3. Drew and Steve set out very good reasons for using it - or, at the very least, giving it a try. It sure makes batch processing and straightforward edits easy; outputs too.

On one point of detail on LR3: I'm just putting together a 150-slide show and was rather alarmed to find the option to select multiple music tracks from eg iTunes is no longer there Seems as though you have to build one track from multiple pieces of music and use that. So I've just imported 30 minutes worth of music into GarageBand and edited it all together. What a pain. This seems to be an issue highlighted to Adobe. I hope they fix it in 3.1+. But if anyone has bright ideas for a work-around........

Interests:Sunlight reefs, warm seas, fine wine, beautiful women. And Manchester City Football Club

Posted 08 June 2010 - 11:41 PM

Proshow Gold. Works every time.

Thanks Steve, I'll take a look. I am hoping one of Wetpixel's pin-sharp savants can come up with a solution within LR - which ideally doesn't involve editing music in yet another program...... The neat thing about using LR is that you can do the whole thing (or you could with LR2!) within one program and any changes you made to the images were immediately reflected in the show.

The only problem with the slideshow was that I edited it together on my desktop and then wanted to present it on my Macbook. There didn't seem to be a way to transport the show to another machine easily - other than as jpegs. Is there a work-around?

Thanks for the link Steve,i am using Lightroom from (beta) version 1, but need to figure out what the new functions are and how they work.Adobe has excellent video-tutorials about their software and they are worth watching them.

Interests:Protecting our Ocean, Environmental Education,
Having fun and Living Well

Posted 14 June 2010 - 03:06 PM

I'll wait for the .1 bug fix release sure to come... ;-)

Jack

Just one data point. I've installed LR3 and have no issues running on Windows 7. Very sweet download install process. Maybe they are getting the hang of this. A quick review of the LR support forums show very few problems. Maybe being in beta forever help the cause. I think you're good to go Jack.

Interests:Protecting our Ocean, Environmental Education,
Having fun and Living Well

Posted 17 July 2010 - 06:40 AM

Hi all,I'm considering an upgrade from LR2 to 3. Will my current catalogs stay as they are or do I have to start from scratch importing my photos and creating new catalogs after I upgrade?--Rob

Hi Rob,Your existing catalog will transfer over automatically. Pretty painless. You will have an option to use the new processing engine on the older images or keep them as they are. This can be done individually. A lot more info here